Government must make a clear-cut decision on whether or not to proceed with shale gas exploration in the Karoo, University of Cape Town Institute of Marine and Environmental Law's Professor Jan Glazewski said on Friday.
Speaking to Engineering News Online on the sidelines of a national shale gas conference, in Port Elizabeth, on Friday, he said this was crucial in finding out if there were payable quantities of shale gas in the Karoo.
“A distinction should be made between the exploration phase and the exploitation phase. A final decision should only be made if shale gas is found in the former stage and if gas is found in economically payable quantities, taking cognisance of the volatile gas price,” he said.
He added that the risks and benefits of proceeding with exploitation should only be weighed once it has been established that there are economically payable quantities of shale gas, adding that it might turn out that there is nothing worthy of exploitation in the Karoo at all.
“In the meantime, we have a golden opportunity to carry out crucial baseline studies which may [provide] vital data in the future should [shale gas] production go ahead. This will enable managers to gauge the extent of environmental impacts resulting from shale gas production,” he noted.
Glazewski stated that the international shale gas industry has shown that different government departments need to find ways to cooperate with each other on large-scale projects such as gas extraction, with a view to establishing the necessary regulatory regime.
“We don’t want an acid mine drainage type of scenario a decade down the line,” he said.
He added that a major challenge, globally, was that governments operated in silos, and mechanisms needed to be put in place to take account of a diversity of studies and stakeholders’ views ranging from scientific and technical studies on one hand, and social and community considerations on the other.
Although the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) is championing shale gas extraction, he said, the activity of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, triggers the mandates of a number of other national government departments, including the departments of Energy, Environmental Affairs and Water and Sanitation.
“We need government to work together when it comes to major projects like fracking in the Karoo basin. Various committees have been set up, but they have difficulty working together because of the various demands on them,” Glazewski said.
He added that the interests of the three provinces that straddle the proposed exploration area, the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape, had to be considered in line with the principles of corporate governance policy.
According to the DMR’s report on fracking in the Karoo basin, South Africa’s regulatory framework must be robust enough to ensure that, if fracking associated with shale gas exploration and exploitation were approved, any resultant negative impacts would be mitigated.
“This will require a comprehensive review of the adequacy of the existing framework to identify any shortfalls or omissions, and to ensure that it is sufficiently detailed and specific,” the report says.
The report recommends the adoption of existing regulations from mature regulatory environments to inform the development of South African regulations in fracking.